New Opera browser comes to iPhone, iPad

It isn't for your computer, though. The company has been hard at work updating the experience it provides with its mobile browser on the iPhone and iPad.

The new version touts itself as a "new kind of browsing experience to complement the iPad and iPhone browser." Opera doesn't want users to get rid of the built-in Safari browser app. Instead, it wants to incorporate its browser into a consumer's everyday life.

The new browser, Opera Mini 6, goes to show how quickly the mobile market changes.

"The iOS platform does not handle well connecting on a crowded Wi-Fi network,” he told the Times. “But with Opera Mini 6, that is our strong suit. That is where we excel. So, in the case where you don’t get that quick page load on Safari as you might want, we can load pages for you faster than Safari can," said Opera product manager Phillip Gronvold in an LA Times interview.

Opera has become a popular company for specialized browsers. Nintendo chose it to power the browser apps on the Wii and DS. However, it dropped Opera for the 3DS and is expected to have done the same for the Wii 2. Now Opera has a stronger focus on the mobile market.

"Opera Mini 5, sometimes it wouldn’t react how people expected because they were used to Safari and it didn’t feel like the same experience. We invested heavily to make the user experience the same, when you load a page, or pinch and zoom or interact with a page on Opera Mini 6, it’s the same way you’d do it with Safari," Gronvold commented.